Tuesday, April 26, 2016

I've been in something of a down cycle with my painting again...work has been stressful and a wicked chest cold that took over my house for an entire week have been mostly to blame. While I'm still suffering with the lingering effects of the cold I've been pushing myself to get a bit more hobby time....and over this last weekend that finally paid off.

As I was digging through my 40K figure box the other day I came across a bag full of Chaos Space Marine Renegades that I had cleaned, assembled, and primed in hopes of painting for an LPL entry a couple of years ago...sadly this never happened but it meant that all I had to do was pull one out...give it a good dusting and get to work....and that's just what happened this weekend....when I found this guy...

His one eye ball seemed to call to me...like one of the corrupt powers reaching out from the void...

...Nah...he just looks wicked cool so I thought "He looks fun to paint!" And so after a conversation with my color consultant (aka my wife), and a quick stop at my local game shop to pick up a few new bottles of paint I set to work.

As you will see I went for a very vibrant color scheme....now before you get all excited about my painting a Tzeentch Squad I should state that I don't buy into all that fluff....frankly I dislike all the "prescribed" color pallets for the four main chaos powers. You can't have rules and still be chaotic in my little slice of the Warhammer world. I prefer to think of each and every Chaos Warrior...or Renegade...choosing his or her own armor color. This is true for my fantasy forces as well...I prefer a many colored and truly "chaotic" looking unit...

hence my ending up with fantasy units that look like this:

The same will also be true of my Chaos Renegades. The difference with the Renegades is that they almost all require a two or three color combo to work with their armor....Hence my consultation with my Color expert! I also downloaded a color wheel app for my phone and played around with a couple of ideas. This app allows you to sample a color from a picture and identify its complimentary colors...or a triad based off your base color...etc. Its actually quite handy to have.

I knew that I wanted a fairly bright color scheme for this bloke....to counter act his seriously creepy appearance...and after much thinking and game planning (ie procrastinating) I settled on turquoise and pink as the primary colors with dark grey for the ribbed portions of the armor and gun metal for the tubes and hoses and some of the parts of his Laz canon.

Lets start with looking at the final product and then I can give you a rough walk through of how the painting sequence worked out for this guy.

I warned you I was looking for bright colors right!?? :)

For the turquoise I used these three colors: Vallejo Model Color (VMC) 970 Deep Green, VMC 838 Emerald, and an old pot of Citadel Foundation Dheneb Stone

The base color of the turquoise areas is a mix of Emerald and Deep Green followed by highlights of straight Emerald and then Emerald mixed with an increasing amount of Dheneb Stone until I was pleased with the color.

For the pink I started with a mix of the Citadel Foundation Paint Mechrite Red and VMC 958 Pink. As with the others this was followed by highlights of straight Pink and then Pink with more and more Dheneb Stone mixed in....and for a last stage a little white was added as well.

The Gray areas were base colored with Citadel Foundation Adpetus Battlegrey which was then highlighted with Vallejo Game Color (VGC) 050 Cold Grey and finally VGC 049 Stonewall Grey. I found this to be a bit too bright...and my painting to have gotten a bit sloppy...so I decided to wash these areas with Army Painter Dark wash this smoothed out the slop and brought the color back down where I wanted it. I also used the black wash on the Metal portions of the model which had been based colored with an old pot of Citadel Bolt Gun Metal.

And for the finally fiddly bits I chose yellow for the eye and "gems" on the renegade's weapon (thanks to Captain Cooks for the suggestion) and added a couple of Gold bits on his big gun and side arm.

Here are a series of WIP photos showing how things layered up...

here you can see I reversed my initial color scheme on his heavy weapon...I think it works better this way.

Here is where I applied the AP Dark wash

As with all of my 40k figures he is mounted on a plastic base from Champ Industries.

And finally...here is a picture with the only other Renegade that I have painted to date...Chaos Boba Fett.

Well, you've seen the studio Shots of my newly painted Terminator Squad...but what do they look like in the field? ...Well that is what this post is about...as well as a few WIP shots of the painting process which I will post at the end.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

I'm happy to report that I have finally completed a squad of RT terminators for use with Space Hulk. I traded with the Mighty Brian K many months ago to acquire a First Edition of Space Hulk...and While I have messed around with the game using unpainted minis ...I now (finally) have a painted squad of Marines ready to go.

As with my other RT Imperial forces I've chosen an unusual color scheme. I felt like painting my termies in one of the colors of an established chapter brought along all sorts of fluff and "baggage" that I didn't really care to get into...or care about. So I opted for a somewhat generic chapter for now with a unique color scheme and NO preconceived "Meta baggage." I may go back in the future to add chapter symbols and develop a name and some fluff for my "chapter" but for now I'm excited to be able to play a couple of games of Space Hulk with some painted figures.

As for color scheme...I've always loved the Quartered color scheme of the Howling Griffons...but the idea of painting that much yellow was unappealing...and in the end I picked the quartered pattern but chose to use Blue and Orange instead.